Classy Master

A year or two ago, I made an offhanded reference to Terrence McNally's Maria Callas from his rather lamentable play, Master Class, in which she is portrayed as a sort of post-Tennesse-Williams model monstrous harridan, and Arthur Silber, who is one of the real Callas' great admirers, reminded me that the real Maria Callas was no more McNally's bizarre caricature of her occasional insufferably qualities than was, say, Salieri--in real life an excellent composer and a supporter of Mozart--the same man as Peter Shaffer's ridiculous musical non-entity and sort-of murderer. (Arthur has a number of pieces about Callas' artistry, including this and this.)

Anyway, there is an entirely, totally, fully, wholly, completely amazing set of recordings of actual Callas' master classes at Julliard, in which she is revealed as a kind, generous, funny, and extraordinary teacher. More yet, she expounds on her own ideas about music and artistry and shows herself to be an incisive, original, and even revolutionary musical thinker. Here she is with tenor Marko Lámpas, who sings "Tu che a Dio spiegasti l'ali" from the finale of Lucia.